And when did you see this emerging? You’re still a very new company, when did you get a sense that this was a niche that you could make a business out of?
I think people have always desired these kinds of things, but taking and productising this has really come about at the same time that business intelligence has emerged for organisations. At the same time, through the 2000s, many of the FMCGs started adopting business intelligence technology to better understand their customers and their sales and all of these things. Well I saw some parallels – what if we could take the web and apply business intelligence technologies to it?
I was working on some business intelligence with a business intelligence company at the time and had worked on projects as a consultant and thought the web would fit very nicely and provide some very interesting visibility.
It was very interesting that the early feedback from the market in 2007 when we first started taking this out there, the reaction from many marketing directors and corporate communications professionals was: “why would we want to know what people are saying online?” So corporate communications and corporate marketing was not at the same place that the web-savvy, corporate professionals were at so that’s really where the gap identified at that time.
So in some ways the social media trend came along at the right time because I guess it probably reinforced to those marketing managers just how important this stuff is.
Absolutely. Social media is of course a very emotive thing we’re in right now and we’re seeing a lot of people talking about Twitter and why it’s important for business. And while that is the case, there is some underlying fundamental business principals that we learnt from media monitoring and that we’ve learnt from market research which just happened to translate very nicely into the web and the social media.
Companies have always asked question like, are customers happy with our product? Is there a swing in customer dissatisfaction around our services or refund process or claim process?
We’ve always been doing these things using traditional processes. The web provided a new source of information for us to better understand that and the explosion of customer communications on social media has only fuelled the opportunity for businesses to better understand their customers.
That said I mean, where does Australia sort of rank in our understanding and our exploitation of social media. Are we still lagging a bit?
It would be easy to say that Australia has always been a couple of steps behind the US with regard to internet sophistication and that has happened with every emergence of technology, you know everywhere from SEO through to email direct marketing through to business intelligence, every point of technology.
But I think overall Australians are fairly sophisticated. There’s a huge amount of highly skilled and knowledgeable advocates of all these kinds of things. So as an ecosystem we’re a pretty sophisticated bunch I would say. There is still of course a little bit of lag for many organisations to adopt some of these things, but mostly because of the transformative effects that they have. If you’re a big company who’s been used to ignoring customer problems, if you’re a monopoly or a oligopoly and there’s been no reason to change because you can’t get caught or you can’t get in trouble.
But regardless of companies like BuzzNumbers, things like Google makes all this extremely visible. So companies have been getting increasingly sophisticated because they’re being affected by it. Whether it’s bad behaviour by a corporation captured on video on YouTube or a blogger telling about a negative experience, those kind of stories are bubbling up into mainstream media. So companies like BuzzNumbers come along and help companies attack problems before they hit mainstream or before they become bigger issues.
And that for some companies has been a harder thing to change, if you’ve been used to the company abusing your relationship with your customer because of a monopoly or an oligopoly. I think we can help companies get better visibility into all these things and to better manage the process.
Could you tell us a little bit about your personal experience? You said before you worked in business intelligence. Did you start this company as a part-time venture?
We followed much of the wisdom out of Silicon Valley that said the best way to start a lean start up is to build a product, take it to market and seek the advice of customers. So in terms of a history of BuzzNumbers, an initial prototype was built in 2007 at a very low cost to prove the concept and to prove that this would actually do the things that people would hope it would do. And we went out and gave it to a bunch of customers and said, hey would you use this? And we let a whole bunch of people use it and we’d listened to how they used the product and we listened to their feedback and over time we iterated those changes and feature requests into something which eventually became commercial ready. And that was validated because we had people using it the whole way through.
There’s a lot of temptation to sort of run out and try and raise huge amounts of venture capital, money to build huge amounts of technology, but we ran the company by lean evolution to ensure that we built a product that was in market and by the time we got to a point of growth we had customers who used us and had told us what we had gotten right and what we had gotten wrong.
Have you had to raise any capital?
So the company has been backed by private equity.
From day one?
The company was bootstrapped and then evolved into some private equity.
Can you give us an idea of the size of the venture?
Look I’d rather not at this point. What I’ll say is that I work with more than 100 Australian ASX listed and global multinationals, using the product at different phases of engagement – so all the way from full blown enterprise wide implementation through to pilot projects and these things. That’s probably an early indicator of size of adoption.
Are you pleased with the way it’s grown?
In terms of the evolution of the company, we’ve been really happy with the customer adoption, the market penetration. Of course like all start ups we feel like there’s a lot of opportunity ahead of us both in capturing larger amounts of the Australian market. From what we’ve seen relatively few Australian companies have comprehensive solutions and policies in place to help manage what’s happening on the web. That creates an opportunity for us.
James was the editor and publisher of SmartCompany and LeadingCompany for five years. He is now the Australian Financial Review‘s companies & markets editor, and a former BRW editor.
